This plugin hasnt been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Simply Static

Description

Simply Static is a static site generator for WordPress that helps you create a static site that you can serve separately from your WordPress installation. This provides a couple benefits. One, this allows you to keep WordPress in a secure location that no one can access but you. Two, your static site is going to be really, really fast.

Keeping WordPress secure requires constant vigilance. Exploits are being found for WordPress themes and plugins every day. Even WordPress itself has critical vulnerabilities from time to time. If you don’t stay on top of updates, your site will get hacked. It’s just a matter of when.

But what if there was an easy way to keep WordPress secure? What if you could lock WordPress away somewhere where no one can get to it but you?

With Simply Static you can put your WordPress installation in a secure location and publish a static site for the rest of the world to see. You can keep WordPress at a secret URL, protect it with .htaccess, or even put it behind a VPN. Simply Static will create static copies of all of the pages from your WordPress installation and replace the URLs to match where you’ll be hosting it.

Performance

Every time you visit a WordPress page it needs to perform database queries to fetch content and run PHP code to render the page. These actions take time to perform.

With Simply Static, you’re creating a static copy of all of your WordPress pages. That time to create each page is incurred once, when Simply Static runs. When someone visits your static site they can instantly receive the page because Simply Static already did the work of creating it.

Depending on the complexity of your site, theme, and plugins, using a static site can easily increase the performance of your site by 10x.

Other Similar Plugins

In the event that Simply Static doesn’t meet your needs, give this plugin a try:

It’s updated regularly and the author is responsive to support requests.

Screenshots

This is what the Simply Static Generate page looks like after you've generated your static files. While Simply Static is running, you can view it's progress in the Activity Log. Once Simply Static has finished running, we'll show you exactly which files we made a static copy of in the Export Log.

The Simply Static General Settings page. With the Destination URLs option you can select how you want URLs to show up on your static site. And for the Delivery Method you have the choice of creating a ZIP archive oder saving the files to a directory on the server.

On the Include/Exclude page, you can select additional URLs, files, oder directories to include in your static site. And you can also choose URLs (oder URL patterns) to exclude from your static site.

Installation

Log into your WordPress website.

On the left menu, hover over Plugins and then click on Add New.

In the Search Plugins box, type in “Simply Static” and press the Enter key.

You will see a list of search results which should include the Simply Static plugin. Click on the Install Now button to install the plugin.

After installing the plugin you will be prompted to activate it. Click on the Activate Plugin link.

The Simply Static plugin is now installed and can be found on the left menu.

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Upload the entire simply-static folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

FAQ

Installation Instructions

Log into your WordPress website.

On the left menu, hover over Plugins and then click on Add New.

In the Search Plugins box, type in “Simply Static” and press the Enter key.

You will see a list of search results which should include the Simply Static plugin. Click on the Install Now button to install the plugin.

After installing the plugin you will be prompted to activate it. Click on the Activate Plugin link.

The Simply Static plugin is now installed and can be found on the left menu.

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Upload the entire simply-static folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

What does Simply Static do?

Simply Static generates static (HTML) copies of your WordPress pages. It works a bit like a web crawler, starting at the main page of your website and looking for links to other pages to create static copies of. It also includes any images, CSS & JS files, and any other files that it can find a link to.

As Simply Static is creating the static pages, it will automatically replace the URLs for the WordPress installation with either (a) absolute URLs, at a domain of your choice or (b) relative URLs, so you can host the static files on any domain or (c) URLs constructed for offline use, so you can browse the site locally on your own computer.

Who should use Simply Static?

Simply Static is great for sites with no user interactivity, such as blogs (with comments disabled) or brochure-ware sites for small businesses (with no forms).

Are there any limitations?

Yes. Simply Static is only able to create a static copy of an entire site. It cannot selectively create static copies of specific pages, such as recently added posts. This means that if you have a site with 20,000 posts, and you add a new post, Simply Static will create a static copy of all 20,001 posts. This, combined with the fact that the plugin doesn’t provide any kind of progress notification, means that Simply Static will provide a less-than-optimal experience for very large WordPress sites. We do plan to support very large sites eventually.

How do I set up Simply Static?

Let’s assume you presently have WordPress hosting a site at www.example.com, and that’s where you’d like to have your static site instead. Your first task is going to be to move your WordPress installation to a subdomain, such as wordpress.example.com. Once that is complete, you’ll set up www.example.com to receive your static files.

If www.example.com is on the same server as your WordPress installation, you can have Simply Static copy the static files to the directory that www.example.com is serving files from. If www.example.com is on a different server, you can download a zip of your static files and then upload them to www.example.com.

Will this plugin interfere with other plugins?

No, Simply Static will not interfere with other plugins. In fact, Simply Static works well alongside other plugins, such as plugins to improve your site’s SEO.

Simply Static creates a static copy of your website, which is just a collection of files: HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc. Any functionality that requires PHP code will not work with that static copy. That includes, but is not limited to: blog post comments, contact forms, forums, membership areas, and eCommerce.

Note that you can achieve much of this functionality by using plugins that interact with third-party services. For example, for blog post comments you could use Disqus and for forms you could use Wufoo.

How is Simply Static different from cache plugins?

Cache plugins — such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache — make your existing WordPress site faster by caching pages as they’re visited. This makes your site much faster, but still leaves your WordPress installation accessible to the outside world. Unless you keep on top of updates, your WordPress installation can become vulnerable to hackers due to security vulnerabilities that are found over time.

Simply Static creates a static copy of your WordPress site that is intended to be used completely separately from your WordPress installation. Your WordPress installation lives on one server and your static site is served on a different server. Or, they’re both on the same server, but your WordPress installation is restricted to only allow access from certain ip addresses or with an additional username/password requirement. Your static site is just a collection of static files with no server-side code or database — nothing for hackers to hack — while your WordPress installation remains safe and secure.

Does Simply Static work on Windows hosts? What about WAMP?

No. We haven’t done any testing on Windows and, based on user feedback, it seems like it is not working on Windows presently.

Reviews

I have a few WP sites that I want to keep as portfolio items. I do not, however, wish to keep updating WP core, plugins, widgets, etc... In steps Simply Static. I exported 3 websites and now can display them in sub-directories on my domain as static sites. This plugin should be fully paid as it has saved me time. Time = MONEY. Thank you for creating such a well thought out conversion tool.

First, i must say i have 3 portals with 1200 - 2500 pages each one. I converted them to wordpress, but the traffic, the robots and the hacks threw down the sites all the time. And then i discover Simply Static. The perfomance in a server (with 2500 pages and thousand of images) is ver very fast, a matter of minutes (i use a muletto domain for this operation). But better (and more lineal) is work in a simulated server in my own pc, dont worry for make and recovery backups for / in the muletto domain. The perfomance depends of the computer. I use a WAMP in a notebook Intel i3 processor 5th generation with 4 GB RAM, and the portal of the 2500 pages spend 7 hours in the conversion. The portal with 1200 pages spend 4 hours in the conversion. All depends with the amount of pages and, specially, images. If you think that time processing is a serious
disadvantage, i never have problems of hacking, i can put a huge portal in a standard hosting service (no VPS) and i can receive 4.000 daily visitor without databases broken or fallen sites.

Maybe works for small sites. Churned for a long time working on 14,000 items on my site, then delivered a cryptic error message and Game Over.
It's because of over-promising and under-delivering plug-ins like this that I'm eager to get off WordPress.